He has given utility company CenterPoint until the end of the month to offer an explanation.
“The communications component of CenterPoint is unacceptable,” Abbott told reporters Sunday. “Corrections are coming, whether they like it or not.”
Democratic lawmakers have also called for scrutiny. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas), sent a letter Friday to the Department of Justice (DOJ) asking for a federal investigation of CenterPoint.
In her letter to the DOJ, Jackson Lee, offered a list of some of the company failures reported in local media:
- A generator hold message
- Reports of workers “sitting idly in fully equipped trucks and not responding to calls”
- Pervasive “inconsistencies and inaccuracies” faced by customers seeking updates of when their power would be back on.
She asked federal officials to investigate the company’s “inability to appropriately and effectively provide life-saving utility services its customers rely on.”
Jackson Lee warned that “without urgent action, and the threat of additional storms ahead, Texas could be on the verge of … deadly and costly mass casualties” driven by the combination of power failures and extreme heat.
Abbott and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick (R), who have broadly opposed federal oversight, called on the state’s own Public Utilities Commission (PUC) to look into whether CenterPoint was “penny-pinching and cutting corners.”
In an meeting of the PUC, Chair Thomas Gleeson (R) suggested CenterPoint’s great failure had been its outreach.
“The infrastructure is gonna break; things are gonna happen,” Gleeson told CenterPoint officials. “But if people feel they’re being effectively communicated with, it makes it a lot easier to go through it. And so I’d say, get out in the community and go talk to your customers.
CenterPoint has pointed to the storm’s surprising and protracted strength.
“This hurricane moved over the entirety of our system, it didn’t brush by a portion of it,” CEO Jason Wells told The Houston Chronicle.
Wells said he was “proud” of CenterPoint’s investments before the storm and its quick work after.
Bringing back power to more than 1 million people “within effectively 48 hours of the storm’s passing is faster than what many of our peers have seen in the past 10 named storms,” he added.
Read more from our colleague Saul Elbein at TheHill.com.